Tag Archives: automation

By now, many of the societal, political, and distributive harms caused by large technology companies and so-called “social” media companies (Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc.) have been surfaced. They invade our privacy, decrease market competition, erode our sense of self and, despite their euphemistic label, our sense of community. Shoshana Zuboff’s new book—The Age of Surveillance Capitalism—intervenes to weave together the seemingly balkanized practices of large, monopolistic data-harvesting companies, painting a more comprehensive picture of their decidedly anti-social strategies. At the same time, she situates their tactics in comparative, historical context as a distinctively new market logic. Zuboff labels the emerging economic regime created by these tech companies “surveillance capitalism” in order to capture the transformative shift they represent in how our society is being organized—organized by surveillance capitalist corporations, not by the people. Put simply, surveillance capitalism is an economic ideology that deploys divergent technologies as a means of cultivating and monetizing our identities.

As Zuboff underscores, surveillance capitalists treat the information generated by our online activity and our situated, physical activity (collected through the Internet of Things) as raw material available for extraction—a pool of resources that Julie Cohen has theorized and critiqued as the “biopolitical public domain.” But even more troubling, once scythed and privatized by the surveillance capitalists, our information is sifted to predict and shape our future behavior. The shaping of our behavior by surveillance capitalists threatens individual autonomy, yes, but also popular sovereignty and democracy itself. This may sound hyperbolic, but Zuboff methodically explains how surveillance capitalism is undermining core democratic values and why the stakes are so high.

About a decade ago, when legal employment dipped sharply, there was a raging debate on the future of the legal profession. Some said the drop reflected a permanent decrease in legal work. The logic here was simple: computers were increasingly capable of completing more sophisticated projects. Having eclipsed paralegals in some document review tasks, they would, we were assured, soon supplant attorneys at writing briefs. These techno-utopians also evoked (what they called) a market logic: the more competition pressed firms to become more efficient, the more software they would deploy.*

Others saw the dip in employment as cyclical. It wasn’t just lawyers who suffered in the wake of the global financial crisis; employment in many fields fell. A drop in effective demand was shrinking the economy as a whole. The cyclical school predicted that when the economy rebounded, jobs for attorneys would also recover.

I will not attempt to adjudicate the dispute here. The most vehement techno-utopians, who predicted mass closures of law schools, the “end of BigLaw,” and obsolescence for attorneys, have ended up looking silly. The legal profession did not become the modern-day equivalent of buggy-whip manufacture. Even paralegal employment has been on the rise. In the broader economy, the techno-utopian story has fared even worse. One of its prime policy ideas—the notion of a “skills gap” crippling the economy thanks to workers’ lack of education—has been widely debunked. On the other hand, fewer persons are becoming lawyers today—an indication that the field is shrinking in some areas, to the chagrin of cyclical-ists.

Each approach is performative, in the sense that it not merely describes the world, but also prescribes future action. From a techno-utopian perspective, it is good to see fewer Americans becoming attorneys, because so many are performing roles that can be automated. From a cyclical perspective, growth in the number of lawyers is a positive trend, since it both reflects and manifests more economic growth generally. But it is possible that each of these economics-driven schools of thought is missing a bigger picture issue: namely, the political and social valence of legal work and its fair compensation. That is where discussions of the legal profession need a political economy perspective, rather than a merely economic one.

This political economy perspective should encompass many concerns. This post focuses on two: the beneficiaries of legal work, and its nature. My main point is that then trends which both techno-utopians and cyclical-ists celebrate as vindicating their own points of view, are ambiguous as to their effects on society generally.

How will new advanced information technologies impact work? This is a major focus of public debate right now, driven by widespread fears that automation will soon leave tens of millions unemployed. But debate so far has tended to neglect the relationship among technological innovation, political economy, and the law of work. This is a major omission, since the automation of particular tasks doesn’t just happen. Rather, it takes place under laws that are subject to democratic oversight and revision – and with different laws, we could encourage a radically different path of technological development, one in which workers have a real voice, and in which they share consistently in technology-driven productivity gains.

Take two upcoming transformations that we’re all familiar with: the automation of some kinds of driving and some kinds of fast-food work. Within a few years, truckers, delivery drivers, and taxi drivers may be able to use an autonomous mode consistently on highways. Later on, they may be able to do so on major suburban and rural streets. But given the wide variation in road quality, humans will likely need to pilot vehicles in residential areas and on city streets for some time to come. And given the wide variation in building structures that delivery robots would need to navigate, humans will almost certainly need to complete deliveries in many instances.